Grow – Cook – Make

This is the season to spend as much time as possible everyday working in the orchard. There will be rewards come summer, right now, lots of digging, planting, pruning.

I look up for a moment, put the shovel down and grab the camera. I don’t need to wait for summer, my reward is right here, right now, blooming at the end of a row of fruit trees. Big Pod ceanothus and California poppy in bloom, side by side. Nobody planted them, Such is the magic of wild plants: they do as they please, and it always looks right.

Jump over to Carol’s May Dreams Garden, hostess of Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, to see what’s blooming in lots of other gardens. Enjoy!

I have been planting like a mad woman this week, putting in my late winter garden. Or should I say my early spring garden? These are the seeds I plant around mid February and the dinners I serve at my table late April.

Seed mixes for sweet and spicy salads, arugula, Sutton’s Harbinger shelling peas and Super Sugar snap peas (hoping they’ll be a little more resistant to powdery mildew than other snap peas). Radishes, Radicchio and Rapini. Bok Choy and Wong Bok Chinese cabbages. Carrots, Red, Golden Detroit and Cylindra beets, fava beans. I am dreaming of spring time meals already. I come back inside and prop the opened seed packets up in this bowl, so leftover seeds won’t spill out. When I am done I’ll get around to taping them all shut.

I still have a little room for a few kale and chard plants. I’d rather find some nice seedlings than start them from seed myself. They’ll be ready to harvest a little faster this way. I went around to a couple nurseries and didn’t find what I am looking for. I’ll look some more, otherwise, I can always put some seed in. Either way it will be fine.

Mid February is a little later than I like for my late winter planting. The days have been getting noticeably longer lately. However, this is turning out to be a cold winter in these mountains. Cold air and soggy soils… not good. I have been waiting. I don’t think I’ve lost much by waiting. Around here nothing seems to be growing these days. Even the weedy grasses all around us are biding their time.

The rain stopped, warmer weather is coming. I get going, as I say, planting like a madwoman: cleaning beds, adding compost, putting seeds in. This first bed to the left is all planted with salad greens. As soon as I put the camera down, I’ll be planting a cover crop in the one on the right, a mix of legumes and rye. The bed in the back right has the root crops and brassicas. The mature plants in the background went in last fall.

Something or other will grow and come April I’ll get to eat my February work. I can’t wait!

This is my first time grafting. I have always been curious but intimidated by the whole idea of grafting. What kind of bizarre magic is this blending of different trees into one? I am used to think of fruit trees as composites, one variety for the roots–rootstock–and a different one for the canopy, the one whose fruit we like to eat–scion variety. I am as deliberate selecting the rootstock of my fruit trees as I am selecting their scion variety. I carefully plant the trees with the bud union–the joint–facing north, so it is protected from the blaring sun. Yes, I do all of that, as I’m supposed to, but still… grafting and budding it’s something they do at the nursery. It’s all done when I bring the tree home.

Until a couple weekends ago. I visited my mountain friends on a chilly winter afternoon for what can be best called a grafting spree. One of our friends is a man deep into tree culture and offered to show a bunch of us how to do it. Under his guidance sticks of plum, pluot and peach scion wood were grafted onto the branches of mature plum and peach trees. As I saw him work, sharp knife and tape in hand, looking at the stick, looking at the branch, making his cuts, joining the two pieces–cambium to cambium, he kept repeating–I got more and more excited. I can do this, I can do this! The magic can be mine.

I need to cut a piece of one tree, sharpen the end, chop a piece off another tree, cut a slit in the remaining stump, insert the sharpened end into the slit, tape it all tight, and done. Wait for the tree to come out of dormancy to see if the graft took. Some of them will not take, but all is good as long as some do take. I went home looking for opportunities to try it myself.

Here you have it, in the photo above, my first try. This is an Indian Free peach, a delicious white variety that so far has performed pretty badly for me. I suspect this is not a good variety for my area because it seems to need more cold than we have here. I figured I can do a little experiment: I’ll graft Santa Barbara peach, which is adapted to coastal conditions, and see which one does better. I did a couple grafts with a friend’s help, and the rest all on my own, ten total. I hope at least one or two take. If non takes, I’ll try a budding graft. Whatever, I will learn how to do this reliably. I am so excited, oh, the possibilities!

Hurry up, the orchard is calling, time to pay attention to your summer fruit trees. Come on! You are in a race against time, good weather and deciduous trees coming out of dormancy. This is how it is where winters are mild. In December trees are still holding onto their leaves. By February they start to open their buds. Pruning needs to happen now!

Year after year my husband and I would select a nice winter afternoon, gather our shears, loppers and pruning saw, and set out to prune our orchard. Over the years we have learned that pruning is mostly about vision. It really is shaping an imaginary tree by making cuts into an existing one, specially if you are working with young trees. Basically, you have this puny little wisp of a tree in front of you and you work on it holding the image of an old well developed tree in your mind. All fine and good except that it turned out that my husband and I have different images of old trees in our mind. The result is a slow moving process as we debate every tree and almost every cut, and trees shaped more by compromise than by vision. Don’t get me wrong, willingness to compromise is essential to a successful marriage, but not quite as desirable in an orchard at pruning time. That, we both agree in. So we did it differently this time. Since he is taller and can better reach the higher branches, he did the pruning. I took the photos.

I am very pleased with his pruning. He mostly focused on thinning, didn’t do much heading back at all. That is, he took away whole branches and shoots, and left the remainder whole as opposed to cutting the top off. The basic structure of the trees is better defined, they are starting to reveal the character of the imaginary tree that has been guiding our cuts every winter. Saw in hand, he clarified those trees who’s structure was confused by our previous compromises. Pruning is definitely a one person job.

The

Bigpod ceanothus are blooming on our south facing slopes. If you are in Santa Barbara around this time, and you look up towards the Santa Ynez mountains, you’ll see a white dusting covering the slopes, the blooms of the bigpod ceanothus. Not this year. If you look up now you will see the burned slopes where ceanothus used to bloom.

Further up, tucked in between the scars of the Jesusita and the Gap fires, in the unburned area on both sides of San Marcos Pass, there, the ceanothus are blooming. Hard to see them from town, you’ll need to drive up the pass road, past the burns, to find them. And there they are, where the red toyon berries were a while ago, where the lilac blooms of the green bark ceanothus will be in an month or two. There they are, the most spectacular of the blooming chaparral shrubs.